Movin' Easy Dancewear

Modern dancers explore into the depths of emotion.  In an extreme example, KDHdance company took on the theme of “Alone, alone.”  The journey is one of courage for the choreographer facing an empty nest.  Aloneness and lonliness are so charged in our culture that most times we accept it and refuse to find the time to look at it.  We usually react to”alone” with extreme journeys into therapy, meditation, depression, divorce, workshops, retreats, and multi-level marketing.

KDHdance tackles the job of jumping into water over our heads and exploring to find a way back to shore.  “Alone, alone” is an encyclopedic exploration of a hard look into the depths of the emotion, the turmoil, the demands of swimming again and again to the bottom and again to the top, winding and unwinding through entangling metaphoric weeds, shedding fear, gulping, and recommiting.

“Alone” is such a difficult theme because dance choreographers have taken as their territory a consistent theme of  the battle and struggle in relationships.  Aloneness and loneliness are a fact we accept and connecting with other people, our world, or a higher power we see as a job.

Making the job even more difficult, “Alone,’ works within the traditional relationships of Modern and other contemporary dance.  Aloneness is a major mode.  Dancers approach their own feelings and project them.  Connections between dancers are to direct, to assist, to join breifly before returning to an alone dance.  Unison dances are a series of lone dancers agreeing to make a statement together.  Even friendship or romanctic bonds are understood as a frame for being left “alone.”  Because all the relationships are characterized by aloneness, it becomes especially difficult to explore outside the  realm of the individual’s feelings and emotions.

Brilliant dancers again and again pull us out of our denial to look into the depths of aloneness and loneliness.  The entire show is book-ended beginning and ending with moving and somehow tender performances by Ryan Parent and Andrea Williams.

Virginia’s Ballet Austin Experience

Dance class as an adult can be a little scary. Our bodies don’t recoup as quickly as a hard workout, our brains run a little bit slower than they did at age 16, and I am sure none of us look the same as we did 10 years ago.

At the Butler Community School at Ballet Austin these fears all seem to disappear. I have been taking class at Ballet Austin for about 6 months and couldn’t feel better about myself. Not only am I working out with fantastic teachers, I am invited into this amazing environment of people who make art all day and want me to get involved. And let me tell you about the facility. WOW!! State of the art to say the least.

Whether you’ve never put on a pair of dance shoes, or are just squeezing back into that leotard, everyone deserves to take a dance class at Ballet Austin.

Heidi at Tapestry Dance Academy says:  “We are a home for so many different dance groups now, Uptown Dance, Austin Dance Arts and their Austin Jazz Ballet Company, Backstage Dance School, Nia, Classical Indian dance, Kid’s Acting, the Lindy Project, African Dancing and Drumming, the Austin Tango Connection, Belly dancing, and a Gabriel Roth 5 rhythms group.

  “Tapestry is really conducive to making connections.  Between all these groups there is not a sense of competition.  It feels so good here.”

Modern dancers have been exploring ways to rejuvenate muscles rather than deplete them with exercise. It is something like the kangaroo that builds energy with every jump rather than depleting energy with toxins that develop fatigue.

The modern dancers beginning with Deborah Hay began to explore the advantages of Tai Chi’s slow powerful movement.  They were drawn to the quality and feeling of movement from an inner intention rather than from a task oriented order from the mind.  This is really the goal of every dancer to meld the planning and directive area of the brain with the emotional and second sense some call the inner witness.

Much of the exploration began with Mary Wigman in Germany and come through Barbara Mettler in her exploration of every feeling and movement state in improvisation.  Mabel Todd put the mechanics to the equation and challenged dancers to know their movements from the inside out.  Her book The Thinking Body is still a major text.

Many explorations of movement developed with the Merce Cunningham dancers exploration of stillness and the innovations of Simon Forte and Deborah Hay.

Modern dancers continued to explore deeper into the workings of the body and developed systems of movement such as Skinner Release Technique and Klein Technique that explore the balance of rest and exertion and the initiation of movement from deep within the body.  See Skinner at http://www.skinnerreleasing.com/aboutsrt.html and Klein at http://www.kleintechnique.com/about.html.

Dancers would lay on the floor for hours with the intention to allow the muscles to come to rest.  From that state they began to develop natural movements that came from a different part of the brain than the planning and locomotive sections of the brain.

Athletes have developed plyometrics to improve jumping and throwing.   Ballet has been perfecting this training for hundreds of years into a system that is safe and effective. And now Pilates incorporates much of the benefit that Ballet has developed.

Definition of plyometrics at http://www.answers.com/topic/plyometrics  “Exercises, including hops, bounds, and jumps, in which maximum effort is expended while a muscle group is lengthening. During plyometrics, a concentric contraction (shortening) of muscle is immediately followed by an eccentric contraction (lengthening). Plyometrics forms part of the training programmes for most sprinters, jumpers, and throwers because they improve explosive power. However, there is a high risk of injury for those who are not well conditioned.”

Dancers know a secret to dancing that is a learned skill and is different from all the work to perfect every movement they make.  Ballet dancers use this skill to allow themselves to be picked up like a solid toy doll, to be flung like a rag doll, or to be lifted as if they were weightless.  There are actually many skills involved but one is simply allowing the body to be moved.

This skill requires a whole new brain mapping not acquired by ordering the body to complete a task and perfecting the execution.  Sounds simple but if you have had a massage and the masseuse said, “Let go of your arm.  Let me move it,” you would find that it might take a few tries to actually let the arm be moved.

The same skill is used by the follower in Ballroom Dancing and in the Scandinavian “he goes-she goes” turning dances. For many dancers, allowing themselves to be moved is as important and as difficult as directing the action of their movements.

Dancers have made many discoveries exploring this skill of allowing their bodies to be moved by others.  Modern dancers have explored the inner intention of Tai Chi and the concepts of momentum.  Systems of movement have developed such as Skinner Release Technique and Alexander Technique that explore movement that begins deep inside the body.

Steve Paxton developed a new dance form called Contact Improvisation that explores the balance of two bodies allowing the movement to emerge between them.  Deborah Hay explores the movement of the cells as an image to get in touch with an inner wisdom of the body.

Today the hands on work of Craniosacral therapy is a direct way for the body to understand how to move to its internal rhythms minimizing the planning and locomotive areas of the brain.

Julie, Bev, Hel, Meg  Improvisations   September 21, 2008 Anna Hiss

Poems by Tim Hurst,  Thanks for including me in your dance space.  From my Hay and Mettler training, I always consider myself a part of the dance and allow myself to work along with you in words.  The words then become movements and rhythms and the sense has to come from that rather than the rhetorical structure or whatever words normally do.  Here are the poems:

I am a murmur.  Never mind the waterfall pounding from my eyes.  Four bodies shaping the air creates water body, water air, play, sounding together, washing multiple brain waves bouncing everywhere.

Exploring the sound of moving, all moves are me speaking to me, connecting stasis, wading thigh deep in loud brain synapses.  All whip and lift catches cortical beats clearing one habit and embarking on another.

This us is once rustled, once truffled in canter pace before banter on the long walk.  After once tuggled, before tumbled, tuckled in to, then coupled.  Once ten’d, twentied toe nails brushed, then the round goes through, the up rolls into, the couple spills over space into.

Split second.   Speed.  Change we need.

Nested in a long string, happiness again.  Relationships set quickly, allow extended finish or more change within.

Rock two bodies in knee.  Lock stop.  Two winged and antlered, frame a two whistle middle.  Ram sent to corner where partners four puddle in Arabic.  Now far away in a line lifted, spelled, pelled.  Fingers spring back a cog wheel.  Elbows rise.  Capesh.